Rand Paul Sabotages Mitch McConnell By Glowing About His Friendly Relations With Harry Reid

Image via CNBC

Pallin’ around with Reid is reason enough to not deserve a seat in the U.S. Senate, according to Mitch McConnell (R-KY). Thus, this is part of his biggest charge against his Democratic opponent Alison Lundergan Grimes (D-KY). And yet…

On Tuesday morning in an interview on CNBC, McConnell endorser Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said, “I like Harry Reid personally. I’m working hard with him” and that they have “very warm personal relations.” Senator Paul in clip one: “I like Harry Reid. I’m working hard with him.” Paul in a second clip said, “Senator Reid and I actually have very warm personal relations and have been meeting informally for months.”

Oh, really? CNBC even called Paul and Reid Capitol Hill’s “Odd Couple” on the lower third. Cozy. So working with Reid is okay for a Republican, but not a Democrat, in Mitch McConnell’s mind. (Following this logic, any Republican who goes along with McConnell, the Minority Leader, on anything shouldn’t be in the Senate. Logic is not a GOP position.)

Senator Mitch McConnell is desperately trying to tie his Democratic opponent Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes to President Obama and Senator Harry Reid, which is odd because Obama actually polled higher than McConnell in Kentucky recently. But it’s all he has; it’s not like McConnell can run on his record. So he likes to make grand speeches in which his biggest accusation against Grimes is the alleged company she keeps, saying that Reid recruited Alison Grimes to run. (True story: Party leaders prefer to support strong candidates for obvious reasons.)

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As if this would make up for the fact that Senator McConnell has been in DC for 30 years to serve big corporations and the Koch brothers, and still doesn’t have a jobs plan.

Thus, during McConnell’s primary night victory speech, he charged, “My opponent is in this race because Barack Obama and Harry Reid want her in this race. There’s a reason…every Hollywood liberal is sending her a check. It’s not because they care about Kentucky, I can assure you of that. It’s because they know as well as we do that there isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between a candidate who puts Harry Reid in charge and Harry Reid himself. A vote for my opponent is a vote for a guy who says coal makes us sick… A vote for my opponent is a vote for Obamacare and a president who sold it to us on a mountain of lies. And that’s why this race isn’t about one party against another. It’s about a government that thinks it can lie to its own citizens and get away with it. It is about holding the people who’ve done this accountable.”

Maybe the real problem here is that Mitch McConnell has been in DC for so long that he truly believes his only purpose is to obstruct President Obama, and thus he sees any work being done with the Senate Majority Leader as a sin when in fact is is what we pay him to do. This is more an admission that he is not doing his job than anything else, but that’s hardly news.

McConnell is desperate to attach the boogeyman of Reid to Grimes, because he can’t afford to discuss his record. The truth is that you would have to be in another country not to know that Alison Grimes does not support Obama’s coal policy. Grimes is clearly not a rubber stamp for her party.

Yet McConnell is a rubber stamp for his party. It is Mitch McConnell who does whatever the corporate masters running the GOP tell him to do. Naturally he has gone Rove and tried to attack his opponent with his own weakness. But this isn’t the old Democratic Party and Alison Grimes is not a pushover. McConnell looks a bit the fool this morning, as factcheckers have a field day with the charge that she’s Reid/Obama’s rubber stamp.

Just because Mitch McConnell can’t manage to support his party without being a puppet for the Koch brothers doesn’t mean that everyone is so lacking in spine and principle. While I don’t agree with Grimes on coal, she has made her position clear to all. She is not standing with her party on this one, she is standing with her state — The same state where Mitch McConnell told voters that creating jobs for them wasn’t part of his job.

So once again, Senator Rand Paul drives a knife into Mitch McConnell’s desperation and twists it.

Sarah Jones

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